It’s hard to think of any book with a stronger hold on its admirers than Wuthering Heights. Almost 200 years after publication, Emily Brontë’s tale of forbidden love and ruthless revenge inspires a devotion that makes any reinterpretation feel like a personal and proprietary affront.
Into this sea of sensitivities has plunged the director Emerald Fennell, whose new adaptation has become one of the year’s most debated films. Dubbed “50 shades of Brontë”, everything about it has been scrutinised: from the casting of Aussies Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Cathy and Heathcliff to the anachronistic costumes and music, and the overt sexualisation of the plot.
Detractors claim Brontë must be spinning in her grave, but this film tells us far more about contemporary culture than it does about the 19th-century novel itself. Fennell has framed the project as a highly personal interpretation, shaped by her intense response to the book at 14 – hence the inverted commas around the title.
She has spoken of being “obsessed” and “driven mad” by the book, of wanting to honour its “primal, sexual” undercurrents and the shock that greeted its original publication (it was deemed “irredeemably monstrous” at the time). Purists are outraged that a novel rooted in class and racial tensions that exposes the extremes to which someone can be driven by desire and pride has been simplified to “the greatest love story ever told”. But in an attention economy only the simplest and most shocking narratives cut through.
In the infinite scroll of content platforms, we are fed a steady diet of instant gratification and vibes, with diminishing space for thoughtful engagement. We live in an age where book publishing has become enmeshed with social media, as BookTok drives sales by isolating easily digestible tropes such as “enemies to lovers”, “slow burn” and “who did this to you?”. Fennell thrives in this landscape – her films are less concerned with subtlety or nuance than with provocation. Her previous film Saltburn was a talking point not because of its delicate tensions, but for its shocking scenes of a sexual nature.
So Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (note the quotation marks) opens with an aroused nun observing a hanged man with an erection. Cathy masturbates under a huge heathland rock while her hot surrogate brother watches on; Alison Oliver’s Isabella wears a dog collar on all fours as Heathcliff feeds her; fingers suggestively penetrate jellied fish mouths and egg yolks. This is Brontë for the permanently online generation, and it’s designed to be clipped, shared and debated.
The casting, too, can be understood through this logic. Much of the backlash has focused on the decision to cast older actors, and to overlook Brontë’s description of Heathcliff as a “dark-skinned gipsy”, racially and socially othered. Those are valid criticisms. But if this Wuthering Heights is engineered for a culture shaped by virality, then its leads were always going to be stars who already existed as online darlings. Robbie is Barbie, and Elordi is everyone’s favourite internet boyfriend. Set all this against an ethereal soundtrack by the gen Z-adored Charli xcx and the method is unmistakable.
Adaptations of classics are always tricky, but there is nothing inherently sinful about each generation wanting period drama refracted through a new lens. Bridgerton transformed Regency romance into a glossy, sex-positive fantasy, while Netflix’s forthcoming Pride and Prejudice is penned by Dolly Alderton, the chronicler of millennial love and desire. If Clueless could transplant Jane Austen to 90s California, Fennell is well within her rights to create a sexed-up Wuthering Heights. My only complaint is that, for all the noise around its supposed transgression, it is surprisingly un-freaky, beyond a few flirtations with BDSM.
Still, when I saw it on Friday night, the cinema was packed. There were squeals, gasps and, yes, tears. It was an entertaining fever dream, with beautiful cinematography and a final sequence that leaves you devastated. When fewer people are going to film theatres, it should be welcome that “Wuthering Heights” has recouped its $80m production budget on its opening weekend. Event cinema sells tickets.
Luckily, Brontë fans who can’t abide this film have countless alternatives that cleave more faithfully to the novel’s spirit, including the 1939 version with Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier, 1992’s take with Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes and Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film. They should also be reassured that the controversy around the film has driven renewed interest in the book itself, with UK sales up 469% over the past year. That is one good thing Fennell lovers and haters can agree on.
Nadia Khomami is arts and culture correspondent at the Guardian
